


Bone & Steel

by Nemonus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Passive-aggressive eldritch entreaties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:32:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8672785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: An Emily who refused the Outsider's gifts settles into a new reign.





	

The first actionable issue was the Overseers.  
  
The High Overseer had been executed in her foyer, and so it was to no one’s surprise that the man who came to examine Dunwall Tower’s chapel was masked and nervous. Emily Kaldwin would have preferred to have presented herself as roughly the same, but she was expected to remain poised now more than ever, and her blood-and-sweat-sodden handkerchief was in a damp pile in her reclaimed safe room.  
  
“Disgusting,” the Overseer muttered as he folded his arms in the doorway and looked up at what was left of Delilah’s workshop. The strange, dark tree had withered. Paint stains had sunken into the teak. The detritus of Delilah’s crafting was strewn about in leafy piles.  
  
“You’ll clean it up?” she said. She had crafted a corrupted bone charm over there, where the disgust had mixed not with righteous disdain but with storybook curiosity. Empress Emily Kaldwin had killed a usurper in these halls.  
  
“Yes.” She could hear the Overseer’s lip curl even under the mask. “We’ll burn some of it out. Don’t be surprised if you smell something … odd.”  
  
“With what’s going on in the rest of the building, I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”  
  
She had appointed Corvo Duke of Serkonos, but neither the writs nor the ships were ready to sail him there yet. Instead, he and Emily haunted the halls while armies of woodworkers and salvage crews took the day-to-day life of the castle back. She had gotten well used to haunting.  
  
Which was why her own reaction surprised her when the Overseer called her back into the chapel hours later. He deferred to her, but he also looked more square-shouldered, less nervous, when he ushered her in to the domain of dust and the crowd of people carting wreckage out of the chapel.  
  
“We found something … odd. This wasn’t here yesterday when we swept the room for active artifacts. Did you put this in here? Do you know where it came from?” The Overseer’s voice was thick with almost-panicked anger, so Emily summoned as much elegant calm as she could muster when she looked down at the rune the Overseer held. It had shed dust onto his gloved hands.  
  
Instead of the Outsider’s sigil it was carved with a rough Loyalist crown, that intimate treachery.  
  
“It was not placed here under my watch,” she said, arch and unmovable. There was something unsettling about it, though. Why such a pointed message? In the same blurry half-conscious sight with which she held the Heart, she saw black smoke wafting off the rune.  
  
“Keep it,” she said. “I don’t need it.”  
  


* * *

  
  
The Outsider was the spoiled king of an unexplored country, and Empress Emily Kaldwin did not take bribes.  
  
Some of her less fearful political opponents had criticized her for this, saying that it spoke to a lack of business acumen.  
  
Sometimes, as she faced witches and hounds in a crumbling library or lurked, soaked ( _I’ll cry when this is over_ ), in the sea beside the solarium, she wondered whether they were right.  
  


* * *

  
  
In the Dust District, the Outsider had insisted.  
  
Holding close to Jessamine’s Heart, Emily took the Outsider’s second gift-contraption with the same reserved faith she showed to Anton Sokolov.  
  
Afterward, she wondered what would happen if she had been able to fan out the time-mirrored surfaces in Dunwall Tower. Would she see herself, running from her father in a game of catch? Would she be able to step onto luxurious grass (fed with Jessamine’s blood) and see the echoes of her own faltering steps as Corvo taught her to keep to shadows?  
  


* * *

  
  
After she took her throne again, she started finding the Outsider’s mark on her papers. She would flip a page forward and back, and the mark would appear every few times. She would stir the water in her bath and find a suggestion of spiraled ink. She splashed the mark away, feeling haunted.  
  


* * *

  
  
“How’d you do it?” her father asked her, brusque and honest, while they sat on the rooftop just outside her chambers.  
  
_With more death than I would have liked,_ Emily wanted to say. Evening was falling, and smells of soot and the sea washed up from the streets. “It was difficult,” she said, and trusted that the enormity of what she wasn’t saying wafted to Corvo with the salt.  
  
“He let you refuse him?”  
  
“I just said no.”  
  
“Sometimes I think I should put the Outsider next on my list. Other times … “ Corvo didn’t raise the now-unmarked hand from where it hung over his knee. The absence of movement meant just as much as touching the un-scar would have. The Tower could have held a whole family of the marked, but instead Delilah had taken any traces of the Void’s witchery with her into death.  
  
“There were such prices for his gifts …”  
  
“I know you feel badly that Jessamine paid some of them.”  
  
She had told her father that she had gently banished the shadow of Jessamine. It had been a hard conversation in the wreckage of the throne room.    
  
“Did he ever leave you things after you saved me from the Loyalists? The Outsider?” Emily said.  
  
Corvo kept looking straight ahead across the rooftops, the wind blowing his hair in front of his eyes. “No.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
What sort of state secret would this be? Was there any reason to keep it from her father? What leverage, what bloody loss was she holding?  
  
She kept the rune in the inside pocket of her greatcoat. It had never buzzed against her shirt. Instead, it felt heavier than it should have, but at the same time did not strain the outside of her coat. It seemed to be drawn to her like electric energy on a coil, spiraling in toward itself while moving not at all. She suspected that if she had opened her coat to anyone else, the rune would have remained unseen.  
  
Now, though, she flopped the waterproof coat open and took the rune between two fingers, exercising the same repulsed care with which she would have raised a glass of poisoned wine.  
  
“I thought you said the Overseers took that,” Corvo said.  
  
“They did. Took it right out the front door, past the elevator shaft and that place with all the broken candles.”  
  
“Ah.”  
  
“It feels like a message.”  
  
“A curiosity, more like. I think peacetime bores him.”  
  
“Another reason to hope for peace.”  
  
They talked thereafter of Serkonos.  
  


* * *

  
  
She dreamed that the Outsider sat at the foot of her bed. This was not unusual.  
  
She dreamed that she visited a shrine, someone’s home-brew Void portal scrawled with small unanswered wishes, and fell backward and was looking up at the fin of a whale, barnacle-crusted and bruised. This was not unusual.  
  
She dreamed that she fell off an onyx slab in the Void and plummeted, screaming. This was not unusual, but it began to happen with unusual regularity, and a sense of bored and loyal pique.  
  


* * *

  
  
On the waterfront, the men assigned to haul the broken furniture and spoiled food and witch-detritus away were talking about the whales.  
  
“They all circled up and swam off again.”  
  
Emily found a slippery gray stairway that ended in the black water and followed it down. A rowboat had been dragged up a stone ramp and gutted. Emily walked until the water sloshed around the soles of her boots. Past the anchor chains and warning buoys the water got choppier. The strip of sea in her vision was choked by the bridge and the opposite bank of the river, but the cold smell of it filled her and stung. It smelled like the chapel and like the Void.  
  
_Another surprise._ Maybe the pod that Wyman spoke of had been right out there, singing their songs backwards, full of their blood and their oil.  
  
She squinted with the sideways sight she had used to see the Heart, and now there was a whale beached in the shallows, almost as tall as the bridge. Its mouth opened stinking and full of bone charms and runes, a choking mess of magic that spilled toward her in the shallow water, runes sliding, fragments of bone breaking and clicking across the mud, washing against her feet, wanting something or perhaps just curious, curious, an empty page filling itself, invisible again when she rubbed her unmarked hand against her eyes.


End file.
